Quantity vs quantity

I've been busy at work. I've been working late and not had "me" time to sit down and write. Saying that, I have found time to buy. After last month was tight, I paid myself early (I do my own payroll:/) and got out of London for a weekend of sun and sea in Essex. I only took a small bag with essentials in including Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell, to read on the train.

My plans were to generally look for cheapish dress for a birthday party later in the month, catch up with some reading and eat some decent grub. Again, I have to say I cannot resist a bargain and clearing living in London has inflated my idea of what is cheap. I've been buying second-hand books for £2, £3 or even £4 and going mad with actual new books. When I found a Cancer Research shop with all books for £1, I thought it couldn't get any cheaper. I was wrong. So at the weekend, I went a little overboard. Not over the pier at Clacton-on-Sea, but I did buy more books than I thought I could physically carry with me.

It starts with a few interesting covers:

24. The Trial - Franz Kafka - £1.99 Oxfam (classic penguin books orange cover - looks so good)

25. Burmese Days - George Orwell - £1.99 Oxfam (I had to buy after just finishing Down and Out, perfect accompaniment, another penguin classic)

26. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe - Carson McCullers - £1.49 Oxfam (discovered Carson McCullers about 5 years ago, fascinating author who's first novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was written at 21)

27. The Viagro Book of Women Travellers - Various - £1.49 Oxfam

Then I wander by a book fair with free entry run by the Samaritans. Tea and cake is served whilst old friends catch up and others quietly peruse the titles. There aren't as many books on offer as I was hoping, but the prices are dirt cheap and I cannot let any interesting titles escape me.

28. Keep the Aspidistra Flying - George Orwell - £0.50 The Samaritans (3 for £1) (following in the theme of George Orwell, in trying to read all his work)

29. Hamlet - Shakespeare - £0.50 The Samaritans (3 for £1) (never read this at school)

30. Pere Goriot - Honore de Balzac - £0.50 The Samaritans (3 for £1) (interest stoked only after reading Balzac and the Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie)

31. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift - £0.50 The Samaritans (great adventure novel, perfect for a train journey or beach)

32. Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire - Jan Morris - £1 The Samaritans (3 for £2.50)

33. The Silent Traveller in London - Chiang Ye - £1 The Samaritans (3 for £2.50) (found an expensive first edition of this years ago in Oxford, the first Chinese traveller to write about his experiences in London)

34. China and Japan; Myths and Legends - £1 The Samaritans (3 for £2.50)

35. The Heritage of Chinese Cooking - Elizabeth Chong - £2 The Samaritans (looking through this makes me want to cook glorious dishes every night, this book will make me fat)

These were quite heavy with two being quite meaty hardbacks so I set off. Feeling though that for £6 that I wouldn't find prices like this again for a while, I went back for more.

36. The Penguin Book of English Verse - John Hayward - £1 The Samaritans

37. Under a Glass Bell - Anais Nin - £0.50 The Samaritans (3 for £1)

38. The Overcoat and Other Short Stories - Nikolai Gogol - £0.50 The Samaritans (3 for £1)

39. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Solzhenitsyn - £0.50 The Samaritans (3 for £1) (obviously bought this recently but the 70s cover looks so good and it was only 33p)

I feel if they are going to sell books three for a pound, it's not really my fault, I do have to buy them. I probably did buy too many, I mean, they were extremely heavy and my bag was literally bursting it's very seams. 

I should be more worried. 39 books in nearly a month, nearly a book a day, 70 quid-odd or £2.29 per day. 

It vaguely and very much on the very thinest layer concerns me that this is not normal. 

I wouldn't say it was unhealthy though. 

Actually, I think it is fine. A healthy and robust interest in books (and reading).

Continuing to fall off the wagon...

I have my usual charity shops that I like to pop in to with a nice turnaround of stock and I tend to prefer the shops who organise their books well into sections. I should visit the less usual shops more often (or maybe I shouldn't?) as I have discovered that my local Cancer Research UK has all books for £1, and on asking if this was a special offer at the till, this is the normal price of a book. I feel I have may have overpaid elsewhere on a number of occasions but my as my thoughts always conclude, the money is for charity and this can only be a good thing.

So last Thursday I discovered Cancer Research UK (which incidentally have a weak A-Z system of shelving, with a large part of the bottom shelf being obscured by clothes) and I was impelled to buy 5 books, one of which was a gift so I shall only list the 4.

14. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - £1 Cancer Research UK
15. The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - £1 Cancer Research UK
16. Geisha - Liza Dalby - £1 Cancer Research UK
17. The Fobidden City: The Great Within - May Holdswoth & Caroline Courtauld - £1 Cancer Research UK

I hadn't heard of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn but the Penguin modern classics cover caught my eye and the back cover interested me "the brutal, shattering glimpse of the fate of millions of Russians under Stalin shook Russia and shocked the world when it first appeared". I see now that Solzhenitsyn was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature and I am certain that for £1 this is an absolute bargain. It would only be better if the cover was more retro looking but then again I might not have picked it up.

I've not read Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden and I hated the film (mainly because just like I find it hard to watch Liam Neeson or Gerard Butler playing Americans, it's hard to watch Michelle Yeoh and Ziyi Zhang playing Japanese) but I am interested in Japanese culture and bought Geisha by Liza Dalby. A non-fiction book, Dalby is an authority in geisha and was a consultant to Arthur Golden in writing the book and producing the film. The back cover claims that she was the only foreigner ever to become a geisha but with a quick internet search I am not sure this is the case. It looks like Dalby attended events and researched into geisha lives but did not formally debut as a geisha but Fiona Graham apparently did. Although I am not giving any extra kudos to Graham, I just think the cover seems misleading at first look. I shall have to read it!

And... on Friday I returned to the same shop and found I must buy:

18. The Accidental Theorist - Paul Krugman - £1 Cancer Research UK
19. Boy - Ronald Dahl - £1 Cancer Research UK
20. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - £1 Cancer Research UK

Whilst my reading rate is nowhere near my shopping rate I thought it might be good to log what I actually read as well. Currently I am on p170 of The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, p180 of Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell and have about 5 China related books that I am partially way through that I won't bother to list.

In the last fortnight I have finished reading a wonderful 1986 edition of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (99p Oxfam) and a 1981 Penguin Modern Classics print of Hiroshima by John Hersey (£1.50 British Heart Foundation) which I read whilst listening to All Farewells are Sudden by A winged Victory for the Sullen for an absolutely haunting experience.

I didn't buy any books over the actual weekend as I was in Bruges and although I did try and look at bookshops, the books on sale were in Flemish. My recent books however should tide me over for a while, they're piled into a tower on my desk and I'll be sorting them this afternoon.